"And Lamb, the frolic and the gentle,
Has vanished from his kindly hearth."
So, in one of the sweetest and most pathetic of his poems touching the
loss of his literary friends, sang Wordsworth. We well remember with
what freshness and vividness these simple lines came before us, on
hearing, last autumn, of the death of the warm-hearted and gifted friend
whose name heads this article; for there was much in his character and
genius to remind us of the gentle author of Elia. He had the latter's
genial humor and quaintness; his nice and delicate perception of the
beautiful and poetic; his happy, easy diction, not the result, as in the
case of that of the English essayist, of slow and careful elaboration,
but the natural, spontaneous language in which his conceptions at once
embodied themselves, apparently without any consciousness of effort. As
Mark Antony talked, he wrote, "right on," telling his readers often what
"they themselves did know," yet imparting to the simplest commonplaces of
life interest and significance, and throwing a golden haze of poetry over
the rough and thorny pathways of every-day duty. Like Lamb, he loved his
friends without stint or limit. The "old familiar faces" haunted him.
Lamb loved the streets and lanes of London--the places where he oftenest
came in contact with the warm, genial heart of humanity--better than the
country. Rogers loved the wild and lonely hills and valleys of New
Hampshire none the less that he was fully alive to the enjoyments of
society, and could enter with the heartiest sympathy into all the joys
and sorrows of his friends and neighbors.
In another point of view, he was not unlike Elia. He had the same love
of home, and home friends, and familiar objects; the same fondness for
common sights and sounds; the same dread of change; the same shrinking
from the unknown and the dark. Like him, he clung with a child's love to
the living present, and recoiled from a contemplation of the great change
which awaits us. Like him, he was content with the goodly green earth
and human countenances, and would fain set up his tabernacle here. He
had less of what might be termed self-indulgence in this feeling than
Lamb. He had higher views; he loved this world not only for its own
sake, but for the opportunities it afforded of doing good. Like the
Persian seer, he beheld the legions of Ormuzd and Ahriman, of Light and
Darkness, contending for mastery over the earth, as the sunshine and
shadow of a gusty, half-cloudy day struggled on the green slopes of his
native mountains; and, mingled with the bright host, he would fain have
fought on until its banners waved in eternal sunshine over the last
hiding-place of darkness. He entered into the work of reform with the
enthusiasm and chivalry of a knight of the crusades. He had faith in
human progress,--in the ultimate triumph of the good; millennial lights
beaconed up all along his horizon. In the philanthropic movements of the
day; in the efforts to remove the evils of slavery, war, intemperance,
and sanguinary laws; in the humane and generous spirit of much of our
modern poetry and literature; in the growing demand of the religious
community, of all sects, for the preaching of the gospel of love and
humanity, he heard the low and tremulous prelude of the great anthem of
universal harmony. "The world," said he, in a notice of the music of the
Hutchinson family, "is out of tune now. But it will be tuned again, and
all will become harmony." In this faith he lived and acted; working, not
always, as it seemed to some of his friends, wisely, but bravely,
truthfully, earnestly, cheering on his fellow-laborers, and imparting to
the dullest and most earthward looking of them something of his own zeal
and loftiness of purpose.
"Who was he?" does the reader ask? Naturally enough, too, for his name
has never found its way into fashionable reviews; it has never been
associated with tale, or essay, or poem, to our knowledge. Our friend
Griswold, who, like another Noah, has launched some hundreds of American
poets and prose writers on the tide of immortality in his two huge arks
of rhyme and reason, has either overlooked his name, or deemed it
unworthy of preservation. Then, too, he was known mainly as the editor
of a proscribed and everywhere-spoken-against anti-slavery paper. It had
few readers of literary taste and discrimination; plain, earnest men and
women, intent only upon the thought itself, and caring little for the
clothing of it, loved the _Herald of Freedom_ for its honestness and
earnestness, and its bold rebukes of the wrong, its all-surrendering
homage to what its editor believed to be right. But the literary world
of authors and critics saw and heard little or nothing of him or his
writings. "I once had a bit of scholar-craft," he says of himself on one
occasion, "and had I attempted it in some pitiful sectarian or party or
literary sheet, I should have stood a chance to get quoted into the
periodicals. Now, who dares quote from the _Herald of Freedom_?" He
wrote for humanity, as his biographer justly says, not for fame. "He
wrote because he had something to say, and true to nature, for to him
nature was truth; he spoke right on, with the artlessness and simplicity
of a child."
He was born in Plymouth, New Hampshire, in the sixth month of 1794,--
a lineal descendant from John Rogers, of martyr-memory. Educated at
Dartmouth College, he studied law with Hon. Richard Fletcher, of
Salisbury, New Hampshire, now of Boston, and commenced the practice of it
in 1819, in his native village. He was diligent and successful in his
profession, although seldom known as a pleader. About the year 1833, he
became interested in the anti-slavery movement. His was one of the few
voices of encouragement and sympathy which greeted the author of this
sketch on the publication of a pamphlet in favor of immediate
emancipation. He gave us a kind word of approval, and invited us to his
mountain home, on the banks of the Pemigewasset,--an invitation which,
two years afterwards, we accepted. In the early autumn, in company with
George Thompson, (the eloquent reformer, who has since been elected a
member of the British Parliament from the Tower Hamlets,) we drove up the
beautiful valley of the White Mountain tributary of the Merrimac, and,
just as a glorious sunset was steeping river, valley, and mountain in its
hues of heaven, were welcomed to the pleasant home and family circle of
our friend Rogers. We spent two delightful evenings with him. His
cordiality, his warm-hearted sympathy in our object, his keen wit,
inimitable humor, and childlike and simple mirthfulness, his full
appreciation of the beautiful in art and nature, impressed us with the
conviction that we were the guests of no ordinary man; that we were
communing with unmistakable genius, such an one as might have added to
the wit and eloquence of Ben Jonson's famous club at the _Mermaid_, or
that which Lamb and Coleridge and Southey frequented at the _Salutation
and Cat_, of Smithfield. "The most brilliant man I have met in America!"
said George Thompson, as we left the hospitable door of our friend.
In 1838, he gave up his law practice, left his fine outlook at Plymouth
upon the mountains of the North, Moosehillock and the Haystacks, and took
up his residence at Concord, for the purpose of editing the _Herald of
Freedom_, an anti-slavery paper which had been started some three or four
years before. John Pierpont, than whom there could not be a more
competent witness, in his brief and beautiful sketch of the life and
writings of Rogers, does not overestimate the ability with which the
Herald was conducted, when he says of its editor: "As a newspaper writer,
we think him unequalled by any living man; and in the general strength,
clearness, and quickness of his intellect, we think all who knew him well
will agree with us that he was not excelled by any editor in the
country." He was not a profound reasoner: his imagination and brilliant
fancy played the wildest tricks with his logic; yet, considering the way
by which he reached them, it is remarkable that his conclusions were so
often correct. The tendency of his mind was to extremes. A zealous
Calvinistic church-member, he became an equally zealous opponent of
churches and priests; a warm politician, he became an ultra non-resistant
and no-government man. In all this, his sincerity was manifest. If, in
the indulgence of his remarkable powers of sarcasm, in the free antics of
a humorous fancy, upon whose graceful neck he had flung loose the reins,
he sometimes did injustice to individuals, and touched, in irreverent
sport, the hem of sacred garments, it had the excuse, at least, of a
generous and honest motive. If he sometimes exaggerated, those who best,
knew him can testify that he "set down naught in malice."
We have before us a printed collection of his writings,--hasty
editorials, flung off without care or revision, the offspring of sudden
impulse frequently; always free, artless, unstudied; the language
transparent as air, exactly expressing the thought. He loved the common,
simple dialect of the people,--the "beautiful strong old Saxon,--the talk
words." He had an especial dislike of learned and "dictionary words."
He used to recommend Cobbett's Works to "every young man and woman who
has been hurt in his or her talk and writing by going to school."
Our limits will not admit of such extracts from the Collection of his
writings as would convey to our readers an adequate idea of his thought
and manner. His descriptions of natural scenery glow with life. One can
almost see the sunset light flooding the Franconia Notch, and glorifying
the peaks of Moosehillock, and hear the murmur of the west wind in the
pines, and the light, liquid voice of Pemigewasset sounding up from its
rocky channel, through its green hem of maples, while reading them. We
give a brief extract from an editorial account of an autumnal trip to
Vermont:
"We have recently journeyed through a portion of this, free State; and it
is not all imagination in us that sees, in its bold scenery, its
uninfected inland position, its mountainous but fertile and verdant
surface, the secret of the noble predisposition of its people. They are
located for freedom. Liberty's home is on their Green Mountains. Their
farmer republic nowhere touches the ocean, the highway of the world's
crimes, as well as its nations. It has no seaport for the importation of
slavery, or the exportation of its own highland republicanism. Should
slavery ever prevail over this nation, to its utter subjugation, the last
lingering footsteps of retiring Liberty will be seen, not, as Daniel
Webster said, in the proud old Commonwealth of Massachusetts, about
Bunker Hill and Faneuil Hall; but she will be found wailing, like
Jephthah's daughter, among the 'hollows' and along the sides of the Green
Mountains.
"Vermont shows gloriously at this autumn season. Frost has gently laid
hands on her exuberant vegetation, tinging her rock-maple woods without
abating the deep verdure of her herbage. Everywhere along her peopled
hollows and her bold hillslopes and summits the earth is alive with
green, while her endless hard-wood forests are uniformed with all the
hues of early fall, richer than the regimentals of the kings that
glittered in the train of Napoleon on the confines of Poland, when he
lingered there, on the last outposts of summer, before plunging into the
snow-drifts of the North; more gorgeous than the array of Saladin's life-
guard in the wars of the Crusaders, or of 'Solomon in all his glory,'
decked in, all colors and hues, but still the hues of life. Vegetation
touched, but not dead, or, if killed, not bereft yet of 'signs of life.'
'Decay's effacing fingers' had not yet 'swept the hills' 'where beauty
lingers.' All looked fresh as growing foliage. Vermont frosts don't seem
to be 'killing frosts.' They only change aspects of beauty. The mountain
pastures, verdant to the peaks, and over the peaks of the high, steep
hills, were covered with the amplest feed, and clothed with countless
sheep; the hay-fields heavy with second crop, in some partly cut and
abandoned, as if in very weariness and satiety, blooming with
honeysuckle, contrasting strangely with the colors on the woods; the fat
cattle and the long-tailed colts and close-built Morgans wallowing in it
up to the eyes, or the cattle down to rest, with full bellies, by ten in
the morning. Fine but narrow roads wound along among the hills, free
almost entirely of stone, and so smooth as to be safe for the most rapid
driving, made of their rich, dark, powder-looking soil. Beautiful
villages or scattered settlements breaking upon the delighted view, on
the meandering way, making the ride a continued scene of excitement and
admiration. The air fresh, free, and wholesome; the road almost dead
level for miles and miles, among mountains that lay over the land like
the great swells of the sea, and looking in the prospect as though there
could be no passage."
To this autumnal limning, the following spring picture may be a fitting
accompaniment:--
"At last Spring is here in full flush. Winter held on tenaciously and
mercilessly, but it has let go. The great sun is high on his northern
journey, and the vegetation, and the bird-singing, and the loud frog-
chorus, the tree budding and blowing, are all upon us; and the glorious
grass--super-best of earth's garniture--with its ever-satisfying green.
The king-birds have come, and the corn-planter, the scolding bob-o-link.
'Plant your corn, plant your corn,' says he, as he scurries athwart the
ploughed ground, hardly lifting his crank wings to a level with his back,
so self-important is he in his admonitions. The earlier birds have gone
to housekeeping, and have disappeared from the spray. There has been
brief period for them, this spring, for scarcely has the deep snow gone,
but the dark-green grass has come, and first we shall know, the ground
will be yellow with dandelions.
"I incline to thank Heaven this glorious morning of May 16th for the
pleasant home from which we can greet the Spring. Hitherto we have had
to await it amid a thicket of village houses, low down, close together,
and awfully white. For a prospect, we had the hinder part of an ugly
meeting-house, which an enterprising neighbor relieved us of by planting
a dwelling-house, right before our eyes, (on his own land, and he had a
right to,) which relieved us also of all prospect whatever. And the
revival spirit of habitation which has come over Concord is clapping up a
house between every two in the already crowded town; and the prospect is,
it will be soon all buildings. They are constructing, in quite good
taste though, small, trim, cottage-like. But I had rather be where I can
breathe air, and see beyond my own features, than be smothered among the
prettiest houses ever built. We are on the slope of a hill; it is all
sand, be sure, on all four sides of us, but the air is free, (and the
sand, too, at times,) and our water, there is danger of hard drinking to
live by it. Air and water, the two necessaries of life, and high, free
play-ground for the small ones. There is a sand precipice hard by, high
enough, were it only rock and overlooked the ocean, to be as sublime as
any of the Nahant cliffs. As it is, it is altogether a safer haunt for
daring childhood, which could hardly break its neck by a descent of some
hundreds of feet.
"A low flat lies between us and the town, with its State-house, and body-
guard of well-proportioned steeples standing round. It was marshy and
wet, but is almost all redeemed by the translation into it of the high
hills of sand. It must have been a terrible place for frogs, judging
from what remains of it. Bits of water from the springs hard by lay here
and there about the low ground, which are peopled as full of singers as
ever the gallery of the old North Meeting-house was, and quite as
melodious ones. Such performers I never heard, in marsh or pool. They
are not the great, stagnant, bull-paddocks, fat and coarse-noted like
Parson, but clear-water frogs, green, lively, and sweet-voiced. I
passed their orchestra going home the other evening, with a small lad,
and they were at it, all parts, ten thousand peeps, shrill, ear-piercing,
and incessant, coming up from every quarter, accompanied by a second,
from some larger swimmer with his trombone, and broken in upon, every now
and then, but not discordantly, with the loud, quick hallo, that
resembles the cry of the tree-toad. 'There are the Hutchinsons,' cried
the lad. 'The Rainers,' responded I, glad to remember enough of my
ancient Latin to know that Rana, or some such sounding word, stood for
frog. But it was a 'band of music,' as the Miller friends say. Like
other singers, (all but the Hutchinsons,) these are apt to sing too much,
all the time they are awake, constituting really too much of a good
thing. I have wondered if the little reptiles were singing in concert,
or whether every one peeped on his own hook, their neighbor hood only
making it a chorus. I incline to the opinion that they are performing
together, that they know the tune, and each carries his part, self-
selected, in free meeting, and therefore never discordant. The hour rule
of Congress might be useful, though far less needed among the frogs than
among the profane croakers of the fens at Washington."
Here is a sketch of the mountain scenery of New Hampshire, as seen from
the Holderness Mountain, or North Hill, during a visit which he made to
his native valley in the autumn of 1841:--
"The earth sphered up all around us, in every quarter of the horizon,
like the crater of a vast volcano, and the great hollow within the
mountain circle was as smoky as Vesuvius or Etna in their recess of
eruption. The little village of Plymouth lay right at our feet, with its
beautiful expanse of intervale opening on the eye like a lake among the
woods and hills, and the Pemigewasset, bordered along its crooked way
with rows of maples, meandering from upland to upland through the
meadows. Our young footsteps had wandered over these localities. Time
had cast it all far back that Pemigewasset, with its meadows and border
trees; that little village whitening in the margin of its inter vale; and
that one house which we could distinguish, where the mother that watched
over and endured our wayward childhood totters at fourscore!
"To the south stretched a broken, swelling upland country, but champaign
from the top of North Hill, patched all over with grain-fields and green
wood-lots, the roofs of the farm-houses shining in the sun. Southwest,
the Cardigan Mountain showed its bald forehead among the smokes of a
thousand fires, kindled in the woods in the long drought. Westward,
Moosehillock heaved up its long back, black as a whale; and turning the
eye on northward, glancing down the while on the Baker's River valley,
dotted over with human dwellings like shingle-bunches for size, you
behold the great Franconia Range, its Notch and its Haystacks, the
Elephant Mountain on the left, and Lafayette (Great Haystack) on the
right, shooting its peak in solemn loneliness high up into the desert
sky, and overtopping all the neighboring Alps but Mount Washington
itself. The prospect of these is most impressive and satisfactory. We
don't believe the earth presents a finer mountain display. The Haystacks
stand there like the Pyramids on the wall of mountains. One of them
eminently has this Egyptian shape. It is as accurate a pyramid to the
eye as any in the old valley of the Nile, and a good deal bigger than any
of those hoary monuments of human presumption, of the impious tyranny of
monarchs and priests, and of the appalling servility of the erecting
multitude. Arthur's Seat in Edinburgh does not more finely resemble a
sleeping lion than the huge mountain on the left of the Notch does an
elephant, with his great, overgrown rump turned uncivilly toward the gap
where the people have to pass. Following round the panorama, you come to
the Ossipees and the Sandwich Mountains, peaks innumerable and nameless,
and of every variety of fantastic shape. Down their vast sides are
displayed the melancholy-looking slides, contrasting with the fathomless
woods.
"But the lakes,--you see lakes, as well as woods and mountains, from the
top of North Hill. Newfound Lake in Hebron, only eight miles distant,
you can't see; it lies too deep among the hills. Ponds show their small
blue mirrors from various quarters of the great picture. Worthen's Mill-
Pond and the Hardhack, where we used to fish for trout in truant,
barefooted days, Blair's Mill-Pond, White Oak Pond, and Long Pond, and
the Little Squam, a beautiful dark sheet of deep, blue water, about two
miles long, stretched an id the green hills and woods, with a charming
little beach at its eastern end, and without an island. And then the
Great Squam, connected with it on the east by a short, narrow stream, the
very queen of ponds, with its fleet of islands, surpassing in beauty all
the foreign waters we have seen, in Scotland or elsewhere,--the islands
covered with evergreens, which impart their hue to the mass of the lake,
as it stretches seven miles on east from its smaller sister, towards the
peerless Winnipesaukee. Great Squam is as beautiful as water and island
can be. But Winnipesaukee, it is the very 'Smile of the Great Spirit.'
It looks as if it had a thousand islands; some of them large enough for
little towns, and others not bigger than a swan or a wild duck swimming
on its surface of glass."
His wit and sarcasm were generally too good-natured to provoke even their
unfortunate objects, playing all over his editorials like the thunderless
lightnings which quiver along the horizon of a night of summer calmness;
but at times his indignation launched them like bolts from heaven. Take
the following as a specimen. He is speaking of the gag rule of Congress,
and commending Southern representatives for their skilful selection of a
proper person to do their work:--
"They have a quick eye at the South to the character, or, as they would
say, the points of a slave. They look into him shrewdly, as an old
jockey does into a horse. They will pick him out, at rifle-shot
distance, among a thousand freemen. They have a nice eye to detect
shades of vassalage. They saw in the aristocratic popinjay strut of a
counterfeit Democrat an itching aspiration to play the slaveholder. They
beheld it in 'the cut of his jib,' and his extreme Northern position made
him the very tool for their purpose. The little creature has struck at
the right of petition. A paltrier hand never struck at a noble right.
The Eagle Right of Petition, so loftily sacred in the eyes of the
Constitution that Congress can't begin to 'abridge' it, in its pride of
place, is hawked at by this crested jay-bird. A 'mousing owl' would have
seen better at midnoon than to have done it. It is an idiot blue-jay,
such as you see fooling about among the shrub oaks and dwarf pitch pines
in the winter. What an ignominious death to the lofty right, were it to
die by such a hand; but it does not die. It is impalpable to the
'malicious mockery' of such vain blows.' We are glad it is done--done by
the South--done proudly, and in slaveholding style, by the hand of a
vassal. What a man does by another he does by himself, says the maxim.
But they will disown the honor of it, and cast it on the despised 'free
nigger' North."
Or this description--not very flattering to the "Old Commonwealth"--of
the treatment of the agent of Massachusetts in South Carolina:--
"Slavery may perpetrate anything, and New England can't see it. It can
horsewhip the old Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and spit in her
governmental face, and she will not recognize it as an offence. She sent
her agent to Charleston on a State embassy. Slavery caught him, and sent
him ignominiously home. The solemn great man came back in a hurry. He
returned in a most undignified trot. He ran; he scampered,--the stately
official. The Old Bay State actually pulled foot, cleared, dug, as they
say, like any scamp with a hue and cry after him. Her grave old Senator,
who no more thought of having to break his stately walk than he had of
being flogged at school for stealing apples, came back from Carolina upon
the full run, out of breath and out of dignity. Well, what's the result?
Why, nothing. She no more thinks of showing resentment about it than she
would if lightning had struck him. He was sent back 'by the visitation
of God;' and if they had lynched him to death, and stained the streets of
Charleston with his blood, a Boston jury, if they could have held inquest
over him, would have found that he 'died by the visitation of God.' And
it would have been crowner's quest law, Slavery's crowners."
Here is a specimen of his graceful blending of irony and humor. He is
expostulating with his neighbor of the New Hampshire Patriot, assuring
him that he cannot endure the ponderous weight of his arguments, begging
for a little respite, and, as a means of obtaining it, urging the editor
to travel. He advises him to go South, to the White Sulphur Springs, and
thinks that, despite of his dark complexion, he would be safe there from
being sold for jail fees, as his pro-slavery merits would more than
counterbalance his colored liabilities, which, after all, were only prima
facie evidence against him. He suggests Texas, also, as a place where
"patriots" of a certain class "most do congregate," and continues as
follows:--
"There is Arkansas, too, all glorious in new-born liberty, fresh and
unsullied, like Venus out of the ocean,--that newly discovered star, in
the firmament banner of this Republic. Sister Arkansas, with her bowie-
knife graceful at her side, like the huntress Diana with her silver bow,
--oh it would be refreshing and recruiting to an exhausted patriot to go
and replenish his soul at her fountains. The newly evacuated lands of
the Cherokee, too, a sweet place now for a lover of his country to visit,
to renew his self-complacency by wandering among the quenched hearths of
the expatriated Indians; a land all smoking with the red man's departing
curse,--a malediction that went to the centre. Yes, and Florida,--
blossoming and leafy Florida, yet warm with the life-blood of Osceola and
his warriors, shed gloriously under flag of truce. Why should a patriot
of such a fancy for nature immure himself in the cells of the city, and
forego such an inviting and so broad a landscape? Ite viator. Go forth,
traveller, and leave this mouldy editing to less elastic fancies. We
would respectfully invite our Colonel to travel. What signifies?
Journey--wander--go forth--itinerate--exercise--perambulate--roam."